Convocatoria: PUBLIC CULTURE | Special issue: Violence and Policing

What is policing? What are its sites and modes of the operation? In
Althusser’s famous example, it is the policeman’s hailing that transforms
the individual into a subject. For Ranciere, the police, understood as the
naturalization of the social order, is the opposite of politics. As a
label, policing has been deployed for a range from practices: from policing
as a liberal ideal form of consent-based maintenance of law and order to
policing as the maintenance of a certain “distribution of the sensible” to
policing as a practice of empire (e.g. British aerial policing or the U.S.
as global policeman). Public Culture seeks a series of essays on the police
and policing as concept, practice, discourse and institution.

In 2003, Public Culture published what has become a seminal piece:
Necropolitics <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/39984> by Achille Mbembe in an
issue called Violence and Redemption <https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/2467>.
Authors may think about putting these two concepts in conversation (though
this is certainly not a requirement): e.g. if politics is the work of death
in spaces subjected to a continual state of emergency as Mbembe has argued,
how does policing conceptualize or account for (or not) the work of death
across multiple, variously inflected spaces from Florida to Afghanistan?

We seek essays that will provide accounts of and extract lessons from a
range of sites that allow us to better understand the relationship between
policing and violence: this might mean accounts from municipal police
departments from New York to Palestine, or of movements like Black Lives
Matter or No Dakota Access Pipeline and their engagements and resistance to
the notion of ‘the police’ and policing. Approaches need not be attached to
place alone. We seek insights from the construction of the ideas of
dis/order and their material policing: the regulation of borders and
mobilities for example, or the relation of policing to consent, or the
policing of language as im/proper. Finally, we also seek
(re)conceptualizations of the notion of the police and policing and
engagements with them as aspects of disciplinary regimes or control
societies, or as the negation of politics, and so on. As this indicates, we
hope for an expansive range of empirical sites as well as theoretical
articulations that attempt conceptual and comparative border-crossings.

Send abstracts of 200-300 words to: *shamuskhan[@]gmail.com
<shamuskhan[@]gmail.com>* by August 1st. Editors will review abstracts,
comment, and solicit full papers for review.